Quote:
Originally Posted by Platapus
RC sailboat? how cool is that!
Do you really have full control over the sails or only limited?
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Full control, as sails/wind is the ONLY means of propulsion.
As mentioned, spent the night testing out rigging setups. Packed the 2 boats (fathers too) into the car and drove an hour to the west side (theres a west side and east side racing club, we have a home/away regatta every year, this was the away leg. Overall club v club scores). Got to the pond. (
Satellite view here. The dock on the south side is about 15 feet long. If you zoom in enough, you can see the buoys we use for marks on the course). And I found one of my side stays had fallen off (fell off in the garage at home, previous owner had never closed any of the Eye-bolts). Had to quickly fabricate another load bearing rigging out of the trunk of my car. While I had plenty of spare parts, it completely negated all of my rigging R&D done the night before. Mast was all out of whack, my vang wasn't pulling right, back stay sounded like a guitar string
. So while my jib was shaped correctly, my main luffed way too early. Ended up not even getting the top third of the main to fill right, which gave away way too much power on the up wind legs.
That said, first 6 races, averaged 3rd place out of 12. Even managed to win one. Tapered off from there. Next to last race, batteries died in the transmitter, so I had to set the boat into a starboard turn, turn off the transmitter (boat kept turning) and replace the batteries. Missed the start by like 2 minutes (which is huge in a 15 minute race). Ended up getting 4th.
Overall I performed well, easily taking advantage of others mistakes to move up, but the boat (and I) sailed like crap.
Next race is saturday, so a full rigging refit is in order, even going to rebuild the rudder mechanism and reinforce the inner hull.
Here is my boat, without rigging, open to dry the inside (small leak I have to find). Note lack of any propulsion!
Inside view of the Hull. Main servo can be seen, the large swing arm controls the Main and Jib (hidden) sheets. Need to also replace the main sheet as there is visible fraying. The long black (carbon fiber!) arm runs from the second servo to the rudder.
